This invention relates to use of intelligent collaborative mobile agents in a computer network.
Present day Internet or web-applications are focused on providing easy information access to users. This model focuses on providing standardization of ubiquitous connectivity, information exchange, and presentation of information to the user. The rapid adoption of Internet is perhaps the most significant event in the 21st century, sometimes referred to as a networked economy. More importantly, the potential scope, size and overall economic impact of this economic system is much larger than what we can comprehend today.
The key characteristics that distinguish the new networked economy are information, knowledge and speed. In the traditional economy, companies rely on physical assets to create value, and have often owned the value chain to minimize the risk of relying on others. In the new economy, companies are relinquishing ownership of most of the value chain activities. Instead, many companies are relying on real-time information and customer knowledge and are leveraging Internet based partnerships with suppliers and contract manufacturers to do business in the most productive and efficient manner. The secrets of success involve xe2x80x9cknowledge exchangexe2x80x9d with trading partners, knowing and fulfilling customer needs, anticipating future requirements, and using real-time intelligence to deliver products and services that meet the customer needs.
With the proliferation of businesses on the Internet, mobile appliances and integration of computing and communications technologies, next generation networks are needed that intelligently automate business to business or personal collaboration on the Internet such that high-levels of automation can be achieved to streamline business functions, cross-enterprise business processes, and personal applications.
Next generation Internet applications and systems require making information and intelligent services accessible to computers (and people) so that the network can adapt to or evolve with new concepts including business and personal environments to better reflect real-life environments. These services will be provided by a computer-to-computer communication network that is highly adaptive to real business or personal environments, thereby providing a real-time, information and knowledge and speed to make business and personal users work efficiently in this new networked economy. Such automation of complex application systems requires a shared ontology and intelligent agents as part of a system that closely reflects a knowledge based system.
Information architecture is a central issue for implementing next generation computer-connected systems. In particular, the following issues have to be taken into account: (a) networked companies represent large scale, inter-networked information spaces; (b) lack of business to business collaboration, and automation via intelligent computer network, still requires substantial human intervention and doesn""t accurately reflect the real-time context of the business or personal environments; (c) standardization of business models, processes, and knowledge architecture is critical to achieving return on investment; (d) the variety of enterprise systems deployed, configured and used cause real problems; interoperability problems are acute when partners attempt to agree and define standards for interoperation; (e) standards are hard to achieve, particularly in cross-industry initiatives, where companies co-operate and compete with each other; (f) commercial practices vary widely (technical, practical, organizational and political); (g) describing an organization in terms of products, goods, services and interactions is a formidable task; and (h) adopting a single common standard can limit the business models deployed
Similarly, in personal information architectures in commerce or other applications, there is lack of consistent knowledge representation and limited automation of personal services and applications and a lack of interoperability across devices to provide ubiquitous service delivery.
What is needed is a next generation intelligent network of active knowledge space(s), including a system of intelligent, autonomous, adaptive, mobile, collaborative and adaptive agents that can be created, deleted and/or altered to perform several different tasks within a changing environment. Preferably, the agents should be able to work across different domains, using a common language and common programming applications. Preferably, the agents should be capable of representing commercial clients (buyers, sellers, traders, service providers, manufacturers, etc.), and existing business systems and should be capable of automating and delivering services via collaboration to the end-users, that can then be viewed in browsers or other display devices.
The field of the present invention relates to an Awit Spacexe2x80x94a multi agent system (MAS) and living/evolving system for active knowledge representation and exchange on the Internet. In the context of this document, an agent is a software component that acts as a client""s representative or set of application/domain components, and/or system service and with authority from the client to interact in multiple active knowledge spaces distributed on the Internet according to some problem domain. An Awit Space provides a collaborative environment for its agents, referred to as Awits, and supports secure distributed application model with public key encryption and authentication. An Awit Space is a distributed programming architecture with persistent state and support for agent mobility. An Awit Space is an Internet multi-agent system that provides a collaborative environment for the new generation of Internet applications in business and personal applications. Current Internet application servers from different vendors and other third-party solutions may be integrated in this networked environment to collaborate and to provide services to end-users (business or personal applications).
Just as Java provides a virtual machine for handling different computing environments, an Awit Space provides a virtual rational machine for distributed knowledge processing that supports both mobile data, such as concepts (facts, constraints and rules, referred to collectively as xe2x80x9cRulesxe2x80x9d herein), and mobile code, expressed in ASpeak, for knowledge representation and agent communication language.
Additionally, the run-time system provides for system-level Awit agent groups and families that implement leasing, encryption, security, and other services such that semantic messages could be interpreted and executed at a context node. An Awit Space provides for replication of context node(s) to support redundancy and scalability needs. The result is a distributed system that supports a fluid configuration of intelligent agents and context nodes where operations can be performed anywhere on the Internet, according to the needs of a collaborative environment. In addition to the node services such as encryption, replication and quality of service (QOS) policies, context nodes can provide other services or new policies to collaborating intelligent agents. An Awit Space exploits these characteristics provided in the system to simplify the construction of a distributed system consisting of heterogeneous computing environment and services. Awit Spaces provide the infrastructure to add and extend existing concepts which allows agents to collaborate to solve application goals. Adding and extending concepts and intelligent agents are easy and natural procedures, while the system continues to support existing applications. Awit Spaces are far more dynamic than is currently possible in data-processing based traditional systems.
An Awit Space-based system federates computers, computing devices, applications (e.g., enterprise, e-commerce, marketplaces, etc.) into what appears to user as a single system that relies on existence of network connecting these computers, devices, protocol, services, and applications. Some devices in Awit Space federations may require more computing and network bandwidth, such as devices that host context nodes, and others can do with much less. Awit Space-enabled applications and services can be distributed in an n-tier architecture, where infrastructure components pertaining to systems and application logic could be deployed on more high-end computers with high-speed network support, while the user-agents could run on appliances or mobile phones. Awit Spaces can also support other application systems or multi-agent systems by providing a xe2x80x9cproxyxe2x80x9d Awits. When integrating large non Awit Space applications, a proxy (Awit) could implement various integration functions and can provide the interface to another Awit Space that performs both data integration model and protocol conversion.
A set of definitions of often-used terms is set forth at the end of this development.